If there’s one team sport in the U.S. where women gain more victories, championships and popularity with fans than their male counterparts, it is soccer. Not at a club level maybe, but at a national level for sure. The USWNT (US Women’s National Team) is the most successful team in international women’s soccer ever, having won four Women’s World Cup titles (1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019), four Olympic gold medals (1996, 2004, 2008, and 2012), and eight CONCACAF Gold Cups. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the women US players fought with the same grit out of the pitch for fair compensation and equal pay with the men. And that is what the new documentary LFG (Let’s F****ng Go, a popular texting acronym), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, before beginning a streaming rum on HBO Max, talks about: the 2019 filing of a class-action, gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation. In the film, directed by Academy Award winners Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, players from the team’s past and present, including Megan Rapinoe, Jessica McDonald, Becky Sauerbrunn, Kelley O’Hara and Sam Mewis, speak out about their attempts to secure equal pay. Former USWNT star Julie Foudy, who played on the team from 1988-2004, also shares her experience in the documentary. “The story’s the same everywhere,” Foudy says. “Women get paid less to do the same job,” adds star player Rapinoe, openly gay and fiercely intelligent, known as the Billie Jean King of soccer (King being the famous tennis player who fought hardly and successfully in the 70s for women-men equality in terms of pay and visibility in their sport).

In the course of the lawsuit, one of the lawyers at some point said “women don’t have the same skills as men …” which was hard to believe.

SF: Yes, it was the U.S. Soccer lawyers, that was their argument, which became public. That is what they would send to the judge. So, the women’s employers’ lawyers are telling a judge that the women don’t deserve equal pay because they are biologically different than the men and they play a different game because they are biologically different.

ANF: And they don’t have the same responsibility or skills.

SF: I think that’s even worse. I think that’s even worse than if a judge had said that because that’s who they work for. The real thing is that the women and their lawyers feel that this case should be tried in front of the jury and so that’s why they are appealing it – they should have that opportunity!

As far as you know, are there other cases around the world, in the soccer world, or in other sports?

ANF: You know what, this is the most notable, the highest-profile case, so I expect that a lot of federations are noticing it. I think that you do hear that women’s soccer clubs are putting pressure on their federations to be better valued, to get more investments. There is not an exact case like this that I know of, but you see it all over, you start to see the ripple effects within women’s sports in general.  And I think a lot has to do with this case.

One of the things that your documentary brings to the forefront is how profitable the women’s soccer games are: I was surprised to see enormous stadiums filled with people. The profits are clearly there. Why do you think they are not more known or talked about?

ANF: Right. And as you touch on it, I think you just answered it, it’s the exposure and the investment. If you are not investing in the women’s sport at the beginning, which is also giving it a high-profile exposure, if you are not putting games on channels that everybody can get and giving them investments from sponsorship in a way that they deserve, if they are not putting marketing campaigns that really sell the sport, that’s going to make it harder to watch on television. But it’s interesting because I’ll bet you could go up to anybody in the world and show them a picture of someone famous like Megan Rapinoe and Carli Lloyd, they will know who they are. But if you say, “Can you name me a handful of some of the men on the US soccer team?” a lot of people are hard-pressed. So, it’s interesting. It’s kind of this double edge, they have a lot of exposure, but even then, it’s going to take dollar figures and equal pay, I think, to make it right.

The “equal pay” cry really became a sort of a chant that united soccer fans and players, people were chanting it in the stadiums, right?

SF: Yes, in the stadiums at the beginning of the World Cup they started to hear people chant, “equal pay, equal pay,” and it would get louder and louder. And by that final game, as they were going to get their trophy, in Paris, the whole stadium was chanting “equal pay.” I was impressed, that was pretty unbelievable. They describe it in the film, Jessica McDonald said that’s when she really felt that this was going to be a movement. 

What were the most difficult parts of making this film?

SF: We had two problems to solve: first of all, how do you tell an emotional story about a lawsuit, and the second is capturing moments, having access. Because all of the players are scattered around the United States and it’s really hard to film them all at once. And so that was really difficult. And to gain their trust was the main issue. Last night, for the premiere of the movie at Tribeca, Megan and I were on stage with Andrea, and I said to Megan, “Sometimes my camera was closer to your face than I’ll bet you really wanted,” and she said, “Yeah, sometimes, but now I see why it was important because you showed the emotion, you showed how tired I was, how beat down I was from this lawsuit.” And she said, “I see now why that was so important.” It meant a lot to us last night when she said that.